exploring the perception of high-school students about distance learning in covid-19 pandemic

The covid-19 pandemic has created the most significant disruption of education systems in human history, affecting many learners in more than 200 countries as well as iran. several international institutions and educational experts affirm that the learning process should continue distance education during the covid-19 epidemic period (dayal and tiko,2020). it is widely accepted that information technology advances and new learning science developments provide opportunities to create well-designed, learner-centered, interactive, affordable, efficient, and flexible e-learning environments (khan, 2005). but in iran, it happened where those who dealt with education did not have enough knowledge, and there was no helpful application for distance learning, so all educational spystems had continued their education in a very inflamed and troubled atmosphere where both learners and teachers were not satisfied. the purpose of this study is to reveal the problems students of high school students of grade 4 experienced during the covid-19 pandemic. the present study is explanatory research. the research tries to absorb precise conclusions about problems arising for students due to the covid-19 pandemic. the researcher collected the data by applying a quantitative method. the data were collected using a questionnaire related to problems in the new learning method. the validity of the questionnaire was measured by asking the experts in the field. the reliability of items was checked with cronbach s alpha. the result was 0.849, which shows the high consistency of questionnaire items. to analyze the data, the spss program version 25 was applied. descriptive statistics including frequency, percent, mean and standard deviation were used. the survey consisted of two domains: perception towards distance education and motivational problems that deal with underestimating the role of the teachers. a five-point likert scale was used to assess participants’ responses to the different domains. their rationale for writing this research is that problems should be clarified, and education officials should think of practical solutions to solve these problems. the researcher selected the participants among the students of three local high schools in shiraz, iran. the population contained 60 students randomly to collect the data. the results indicated that most students agreed on the point that e-learn ing had adverse effects on their learning. this study s findings revealed that 86% of the population had the opinion that distance learning is not helpful for them. the research shows that most of the problems are related to technical problems such as the internet and connections, lack of a proper app, and also shows that teachers could not teach the lessons as they can, students can’t participate in class except for one or two times, so it reduces their motivation to be present in a class all the time, and they just are at class without any desire to listen to lessons. this led to the weakening of the role of teachers, and students lost their motivation to learn and just passed the course. the result of this study can be helpful for teachers and authorities of the high-school educational systems.